United States Intelligence Community

The “Community” is made up of sixteen organizations, and eight of them are within the Department of Defense.

Four are joint service organizations:

• Defense Intelligence Agency
• National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
• National Reconnaissance Office
• National Security Agency

And four are elements of the individual services:

• Air Intelligence Agency
• Army Intelligence
• Office of Naval Intelligence
• Marine Corps Intelligence Activity

There is one, and only one, independent intelligence entity in the Community: the Central Intelligence Agency.

Seven other organizations in the Community are parts of other Cabinet-level Departments.

It should be noted that the only intelligence agency not faulted in the run-up to the Iraq War was the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), but let’s not reward competence.

If Hayden becomes the Director of the CIA, nine of the sixteen voices at the table will belong to uniformed military officers.

CNet reports that in addition to Qwest, the following companies also told NSA NO: RCN, AOL Time Warner, Comcast, Cox Communications, Cablevision Systems, Cingular Wireless, Microsoft, T-Mobile and EarthLink.

As I keep saying: if this was legal and above board these companies wouldn’t have refused to participate. They have received enough complaints about selling their customer lists to others, that they know people don’t like it.

Businesses don’t like it either. I’ve signed enough non-disclosure agreements over the years to be able to say that businesses of any size don’t want their competitors to know who they call.

The NSA doesn’t have the people to handle this workload, so they are going to hire a contractor and there is no guarantee that the contractor won’t run a few commercial searches while working on the contract. The potential for abuse is huge.

Update: Michael adds Working Assets to the list of the “no” group, and writes about his exchange with Verizon concerning their complicity.